Gmail and Contacts get better with Google+ | Hacker News Reader

Gmail and Contacts get better with Google+

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75 pointsjoshma38 comments

Wow, what is up with those share buttons at the end of each post? Just in case nobody else is seeing this, they start off cramped together and when moused over they break apart in a very fluid animation.

Yes it looks nice, but it moves the button from under the cursor! And then just as bad, the cursor doesn't change to a hand to show it's an interact-able object.

Is this just me? Am I alone in seeing this or thinking that this is bad UX?

The expand thing is strange but it looks like it's a latency improvement so that they don't have to fetch the counts for all the posts on page load.

The cursor is a hand for me though on Chrome though.

Not sure if it's part of these changes but I'm glad that everyone you've ever emailed no longer gets added to your contacts list. That was a pain whenever I synced with my Android phone, all of a sudden my phonebook was full of useless email addresses that I'd emailed once off. So glad that's fixed!

Google added an option to disable this.

Anyone have a good idea of how many people are using Google Contacts?

I've looked at the API before and considered some mashup ideas, but never pursued because I don't know anyone relying on it.

People with Android phones rely on it quite heavily and likely have many well-curated Google contacts.

It's integrated with Android pretty deeply, so I imagine a lot of Android users are, even if they don't know it.

Many people use Google Apps / Gmail and synchronize it with their iPhones (email, calendar, contacts, ...)

I do this. I sync'd my iPhone's contacts with my Google Apps account and actually got rid of all the contacts on my iPhone itself. Now all the contacts on my phone are my Google Apps contacts accessed through Google's Exchange.

I finally have a unified contact list! Well, maybe not quite unified: my instant messaging contacts -- on non Jabber-based services (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) -- are still separate.

I do this as well. (Just switched from android (N1) to iPhone (4S) just to try out the iPhone experience)

My only gripe is that iPhone does not sync all phone numbers. example - Google allows custom phone number types (other than work/mobile/home) that I use a lot and none of these custom phone numbers show up on iPhone. (I wonder if there is a solution to this. Haven't searched for one yet) It was all nicely integrated on android.

I use it to sync the contacts on my iphone with my computers.

I rely heavily on it with my Android phone. It's brilliant, and generally Just Works!

Google Contacts can have my firstborn son. As a user, I think it's brilliant.

So I click "Edit Profile" but don't see any phone number fields.

Even if I did I'd be scared it's going to get published to the universe since Google seems to repeatedly emphasise that my profile is public and there is nothing I can do about it.

Does anyone know how to use this? Is it still rolling out?

Edit: never mind, phone number is hidden under Places Lived / Home, which seems extremely weird to me.

You can also specify which circles see the entire blob of contact info. I would prefer to send each bit to a different circle, but it's 1 step up from the permapublic name field.

Every time an announcement like this is made I get a bunch of angry messages from friends I've convinced to use Google Apps for their personal email who will have to wait an unspecified amount of time for the new features.

Well, it's your fault, so I hardly blame them. Why on earth would you tell people to use Google Apps as a personal email service? It's a mallet to a crack a nut. Google Apps is for businesses, it's probably even a little much for SOHO. If people want their own email address, just buy the domain, forward the email to Gmail and use the Send As feature to send from that address.

I really don't have a lot of sympathy for the cat-calls that surrounds Every Single Google Launch when it isn't on Apps straight away. Except if you'd been given weird information from someone who should know better, I suppose.

I would say Google probably should shoulder some of the responsibility for not dissuading the individual users it doesn't want to support with GApps from signing up.

One needs an actual MX to forward to a gmail address, no? You can't just point your MX record at Google's servers. That's an additional cost that doesn't exist for Google Apps for Domains.

PS: If Google wanted to gear it towards businesses, they should have named it Google Apps for Businesses. In general though, I'm sure that the free vs. paid accounts is probably a pretty good divider between business and personal use.

Nice. CRM for your mom.

As seen on HN... :)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3290007

Did they buy Rapportive?

Nope, we're still here :)

Good good, I've great fondness for your little sidebar.

Now all of my Google+ contacts show up in the gmail chat (that appears next to gmail window). How often do we chat with our contacts in google+? I don't like this since it crowds out my legitimate contacts from gmail chat.

I do rather often, at least for the contacts I've left in there.

As tonfa points out here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3331505

You can actually select which Circles show up in your gchat list. Which is really useful!

The headline says "Gmail and Contacts get better with Google+", but actually most of these features are about making your Google+ experience better, not your gmail experience better. In other words, this smells more of corporate policy than product improvement.

Not sure how you're coming to that conclusion. It gives you G+ data when you look at a contact in Gmail. It automatically updates your contacts' info. It seems like a really good set of pretty obvious integrations that makes all of the products better, to me.

More data is not necessarily better. This just destroyed the usability of chat. And I care about chat a lot more than G+, so if one of the two needs to go, it's going to be G+.

For this to not be a major regression, at least you would need to be able to limit the import to only to some circles. It would even fit in better with the Google+ ideals of treating different groups of "friends" differently.

Completely agree. I assume that's coming. It's another obvious use of Circles.

You can select which circles appear in chat (but only from the G+ chatbox as far as I know).

Ah, under "privacy". Not exactly the most intuitive process, but at least it's possible. Thanks!

I just tried it. Changing it in the G+ chatbox also changes it in gmail. Which is good, because I use the gmail one (since I have gmail open all the time) and not the G+ one.

Am scared of the potential surprises that'll come along.

I shared a google map (you know those created your maps things) and I didn't realise that it showed up on my g+.

All I thought was, wtf. I shared it from google maps and didn't have any intention of whatever circles it went to, to know about it.

Super confusing and worrying.

I'd say being able to search Gmail by Circle is pretty clearly an enhancement to Gmail, not an enhancement to Google+..

Every one of these features would be great if it were the Facebook equivalent, instead of G+. It's unfortunate that Google's insistence on never acknowledging Facebook's existence limits their long term relevance and success.

It limits Google's long term relevance? Or Facebook's? I'm not clear which you mean, but I think you're mistaken no matter which way you meant it.

Both companies are doing fine and will probably continue to do fine despite duplicating some of each other's features.

Slamming Google for not adding Facebook integration, when it was Facebook who blocked Google's access to Facebook contact information in the first place is ... odd, at the very least.

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